


been waiting around all night

by shoemaster



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Dreamwalking, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-24 07:11:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17699930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoemaster/pseuds/shoemaster
Summary: Dreamwalking wasn't Michael's specialty, but he could do it.





	been waiting around all night

**Author's Note:**

> This borrows dreamwalking from my very vague memories of the Roswell High books/the original tv series, more than what we've seen so far in the current series. I basically ignored the Rosa plot, because I have no idea what's happening there and am just going to let the show handle it.
> 
> Thanks to beatperfume for letting me spin this story in three different directions at her before I even began writing, and katarin for letting me shout at her about it on a street corner before she even watched the show. Abby's a champ for cleaning it all up for me.
> 
> Title from Hands Are Tied by the Gin Blossoms.

Dreamwalking wasn't Michael's specialty - not like Isobel who used to treat it like a walkie-talkie, before puberty hit and she saw a little bit more than she intended one night, and now used it to force Michael to pay attention in classes he tried to sleep through - but he _could_ do it. So it wasn't a complete surprise when he fell asleep one night next to Alex, in no real rush to get back to his latest group home, and found himself wandering a landscape he didn't recognize.

"My grandma's house," Alex said from behind him. "Watch out for the corgis."

On cue, a group of three stumpy dogs went rushing past them, yapping away.

"I don't usually dream about you here," Alex said, once the barking had ended.

"Where _do_ you usually dream about me?" Michael asked with a slight leer.

Sure enough, the scene flickered back to Alex's bedroom, and then again, to the back seat of Alex's car before finally settling on the boy’s locker room at school.

"Wow, Alex, didn't think you had it in you," Michael said. 

Real Alex would blush and duck his head at that, but in his dreams, Alex was shameless. "There's not many places I don't think about you," he said simply, pulling Michael flush against him.

After that, Michael maybe did it on purpose sometimes, when they hadn't seen each other in a few days, or if Alex seemed caught up in something he wouldn't talk about with Michael while they were awake.

He did feel guilty, occasionally, but not for the reasons he probably should. Max would tell him that he shouldn't mess with a human's mind, that he was betraying Alex's trust; Isobel would point out that he might make Alex suspicious, and Alex's dad worked for the Air Force, so he could be putting them all in danger. Michael would tell them they were both overreacting, if he told them anything about Alex to begin with, which he didn't.

Instead, he felt bad because it was just easier to _talk_ to Alex while they were asleep. Alex didn't remember most of this stuff anyway, just vague impressions. (Michael had panicked the first time Alex mumbled "I had a dream about you last night."

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, I think we were river rafting? I’m not sure. It was nice.”

Michael tried not to relax too obviously. They _had_ been river rafting, right up until the zebras attacked and Michael had quickly switched things to a beach scene he’d pulled off the vice principal’s calendar.)

So even if Michael didn’t like to talk about foster care, about how much it sucked watching Max and Isobel play happy family with the Evanses, he could sometimes, with Alex. Even if they were dodging Tetris blocks falling from the sky at the time.

Michael never had the nerve to say “I love you” when they were awake, but it was almost harder not to when he was following Alex through his subconscious. Sometimes Alex said it back, sometimes the dream changed before Alex said anything, and he got distracted by the sudden arrival of his brothers dressed as Ninja Turtles. If Michael hoped that maybe it would penetrate eventually, that Alex would know how Michael felt and be the one brave enough to say it while their eyes were wide open, well. He tried not to be disappointed when it didn’t happen.

*

In his dreams, Alex flew. 

Sometimes it was Top Gun shit, other times he just soared like a bird. Other than the two of them being naked, it was the most common theme for Michael to come across. So when Alex climbed into Michael’s truck one day and handed him a heavy envelope emblazoned with the words _Air Force Academy_ , Michael wasn’t exactly surprised.

“So, this summer’s gonna be it, huh?” Michael said, after a moment staring out at the dust swirling over the parking lot. 

It’s not like they didn’t both know that Alex would be leaving for college and Michael wouldn’t, but Michael had spent more than a few class periods doing the math on how long it would take to drive to Albuquerque, Austin, Tempe, or even LA. How much gas would cost. But even if Colorado Springs was one of the shorter drives, there wouldn’t be any room for him there. There couldn’t be. 

Still, August was months away, they’d have plenty of time to get tired of each other, for this to finally burn itself out -

“Basic Cadet Training starts in June,” Alex said, not looking at Michael.

“Oh.” 

If August seemed forever away, June felt like it was just around the corner. “But that’s -” Michael started to protest before he stopped himself. Nothing he could say would change Alex’s mind, so there was no point embarrassing himself by trying. “I guess we’re just going to have to go out with a bang, huh?”

*

It was more of a whimper. 

There were fewer opportunities for Michael to spend the night at the Manes house, or Alex didn’t extend them as often. He didn’t ask which. Their hookups seemed to be limited to the back of Michael’s truck or a few stolen moments before Alex would say, “My brother is home on leave, so…”

He never kicked Michael out, he never said “I want to go home now”, but that was only because Michael never gave him the chance.

It wasn’t as easy to dreamwalk when Alex wasn’t next to him, his bare skin flush against Michael’s, sandwiched between old sleeping bags and worn blankets on the metal of the truck bed, but by that point, Michael’s mind was reaching for the connection with little conscious effort on his part. It eased the ache of the way Alex was pulling away, even as it created new aches when Michael woke up alone in his bedroom.

They had one week between their high school graduation and Alex leaving for Colorado, and if Michael had had his way, they’d have taken off into the desert and spent the whole time there alone. Instead, he got one night.

“I’m going to miss you, you know,” Alex said, lying in the bed of Michael’s truck.

“No, you won’t,” Michael said. There were goosebumps forming where Alex’s sweat was cooling in the night air.

The truck rumbled beneath them, and only Michael’s hold on Alex and the tie down behind the wheel well kept them from falling out the back as the truck launched itself into space. Michael laughed, sharp and bitter. “You gonna be an astronaut, Alex? Go find Roswell’s little green men and tell them where they left their stuff?”

Alex grinned. “Maybe.”

*

When Alex left for Colorado, Michael didn’t sleep for two days. He didn’t want to miss him there in addition to all the empty places around town Michael didn’t even realize he expected to see him. It’s not like they got milkshakes at the Crashdown together, but sometimes Michael would accompany Max on one of his stalker missions and Alex would be there studying and talking with Maria or teasing Liz, and their eyes might catch every so often. At the gas station where it felt like Michael had to fill up every other day, Alex might be pulling out as he pulled in. Just seeing a black Jeep and knowing that it might be Alex inside - instead, both were in Colorado, four hundred miles and light years away.

He sat in the back of his pickup truck and stared up at the sky, trying not to think about anything.

“Are you okay?” Max asked, coming out of fucking nowhere and almost making Michael choke on his nail polish remover.

“I keep telling Isobel we need to bell you,” Michael said as he wiped his mouth. 

Max ignored him and climbed into the truck, grabbing the bottle from Michael. “You know the Walgreens stuff is better, right?”

“That shit is green, Max, I’m not drinking green.”

“Isobel said Mr. Foster offered you a job up at the ranch?”

“Shoveling shit,” Michael said. “But it should keep me in the finest generic brand chemicals, so who am I to complain?”

“El Paso’s not that far away, I’ll be back for breaks, and Isobel’s only going to be in Albuquerque.”

Oh, Michael almost said aloud, Max thought this was about _them_ leaving. He was a few months early on that one. Michael was going to be an old hat at being left behind by the time September rolled around. “She’s gonna be home every other weekend bitching about what an asshole you are for not going there, too.”

“I could’ve gone...somewhere even further away,” Max said, tipping the bottle against his mouth.

Michael let that slide; he didn’t want to rehash Liz Ortecho, Max’s personal _axis mundi_ , again. For a second, he wanted to tell Max everything, to tell him that Michael was at least being a sad sack about the end of an _actual relationship_ , so he could cool it with the woe-is-me looks, because woe was fucking Michael.

But he didn’t want Max’s pity. He picked up the purple bottle cap, hands-free, and threw it at Max's head.

"Ow!" Max said, even though it couldn't possibly have hurt. He picked it up and began spinning it slowly in the air, and Michael let him for about thirty seconds before he snatched it away, sparking a game of keep away, like they'd been playing since they first realized just how different they were from other kids. Michael always won, but Max never seemed bothered by that fact.

"You're going to have to actually answer your phone," Max said eventually, after he gave up the fight.

"For Isobel, maybe," Michael said, forcing a grin.

*

When he finally did sleep, he couldn't help looking for Alex. It was probably too far, the Air Force probably had them doing weird drills in the middle of the night, it was stupid and pointless, but then suddenly Alex was there. Michael felt like he was trying to watch a badly pirated copy of a movie: the audio and the visual seemed out of sync, and the colors were desaturated, or maybe that was just how Alex was dreaming. 

"Michael!" Alex reached for him almost immediately, and Michael went easily, pleased to find that at least some part of Alex missed him. But their kiss was interrupted by shouting from a drill sergeant who looks a lot like Vin Diesel.

Michael was about to think him away, but Alex pulled back. "You're not supposed to be here."

"Who cares?" Michael asked. If this was all he could get, he was going to take it with both hands.

"You can't be here, Michael. It's not...it's not right."

"Wait -" 

It was too late: Alex was gone, and Michael woke up with a splitting headache.

*

Michael didn’t need to be told twice. After that, he focused on working himself into the ground for old man Foster, who said that he’d let Michael buy his old Airstream, if he could come up with the cash by the end of the summer. On nights where he didn’t feel like he could fall into a dreamless sleep, he went to the Wild Pony or even Saturn’s Ring to find someone to fuck him into oblivion.

It worked well enough; he bought the Airstream and let Isobel take a whack at “decorating” it because otherwise, she might want to talk about how worried she was about leaving him behind.

“It’s only a few months until Thanksgiving,” Max had said, and Michael nodded, like that didn’t sound like a bunch of bullshit.

But those few months passed by quickly, until one night Michael went to bed with Ana from the pizza place and woke up in the middle of an exam in a lecture hall he didn’t recognize.

It only took him a second to see Alex in front of him, frantically paging through the test - it looked like it was written in Greek or maybe Hebrew - and Michael froze. He didn’t want to be here, there was no way he could have tried to dreamwalk across state lines tonight, but then he realized he _hadn’t_. 

Alex was home for Thanksgiving, too.

“What do you say we get out of here?” Michael asked, leaning forward to whisper in Alex’s ear. None of the other dream students noticed him, but Alex whipped around.

“Not _now_ , Michael.”

Michael tried not to read to much into the fact that Alex didn’t seem surprised to see him. Had he still been dreaming about Michael, without Michael’s help? “It’s not like you can read this anyway. Just mark all the answers as ‘B’ and let’s go.”

“It’s an essay test,” Alex said, but a scantron appeared in his hand anyway.

As they drifted through Alex’s dreams, Michael realized how much he’d missed this, almost as much as he’d missed actually touching Alex. “So other than tests given in ancient languages, how’s school going? Anyone there hotter than me?”

“I’m not. I can’t -”

“It’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, right? Not Don’t Look?” Michael goaded him.

“There’s no one like you,” Alex said quietly.

“Well of course not, I’m one in two billion,” Michael said, trying not to let on that Alex had nearly knocked the air from his lungs.

“One in a million not good enough for you?” Alex asked.

“I strive for accuracy in all things,” Michael said. “So are you going to kiss me, or what?”

*

He spent the whole weekend waiting for Alex to call, text, anything. Even Mrs. Evans noticed him checking his phone when he was hanging out at their place. “Waiting on something?”

“We’re just not good enough for him anymore,” Max said, kicking Michael’s chair.

“You’re basically tourists, now. They’re gonna take away my townie card if I keep hanging out with you.”

“Ugh,” Isobel said, wrinkling her nose. “You’re a local, not a townie.”

Michael dreamed with Alex every night that weekend, but he never got a call.

*

It continued like that for years. No contact at all, except for when Michael accidentally dreamwalked while Alex was home visiting. It got to the point where Michael began to actively practice not doing it, so he didn’t torture himself when Alex was home for weeks at a time around the holidays or his breaks from school. He was only caught off guard occasionally, and even then, he got better about not lingering too long.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed the same year Alex graduated, but Michael didn’t care. It sure as hell didn’t change anything. Alex was going off and playing Top Gun in the Middle East while Michael fixed cars and got into bar fights. They were the past, just a used-to-be. Alex had just been the first in a very long line.

The years moved on, and so did Michael. His life was fine, really. He survived the lead up to Isobel and Noah’s wedding, put on the suit and stood next to her with Max and some woman he thought he had slept with in 2010, and went home with one of the groomsmen. He went to work on the artifacts from their cave, got good at pretending to be any other random nut on the internet to find out if anyone else had anything interesting, and managed to only get arrested by Max like once a month. 

He looked so disappointed every time, which made Michael disappointed in turn. He’d always been the softest of the three of them, the most trusting. Now that they were on the downward slope of their twenties, Michael expected him to have learned _something_ about the world, even just as a defense mechanism.

Those were the things he spent his life thinking about, not his ex-whatevers, so it came as one hell of a shock one night when he dreamt of Alex for one split second, just fire and _pain_ before it vanished. He sat up straight in bed and scrambled over Diego to his bathroom and puked in the toilet.

“Michael?” Diego mumbled from the bed. “What the fuck?”

Michael wiped the back of his mouth; he had no fucking idea. “Food poisoning or something.”

He rinsed out his mouth in the sink before stealing some of Diego’s mouthwash and wished he had his pants on. “I’m gonna go.”

“Are you sure you’re okay to drive, esé?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.” Probably. As long as he stayed awake. “See you around, yeah?”

He made it home safe, the empty roads not providing much of a challenge, but he didn’t get back to sleep that night. Every time he tried, his body jerked awake, like it was flinching away from the memory of the pain. For two days, he scoured the news, trying to find a report about _something_ that would explain what happened. 

Something that would say whether or not Alex was still alive.

Isobel might have known something, she did all that work with the veterans' groups, she probably had connections, but asking her would mean telling her why, and he couldn’t. Not now, now when she would get that pitying look on her face, instead of yelling at him for being stupid enough to dreamwalk with the same human that many times.

Michael got his answer within the week. He went to bed one Sunday night - alone, fortunately - and found himself walking in Alex’s dreams. But they weren’t anything like the dreams he’d experienced before. They were dark and there was fire _everywhere_ , and so much sand whipping Michael’s skin, but not the rusty color of the desert surrounding Roswell. He could barely see Alex through it all. He ended up shouting Alex’s name into the hot wind, only to find himself yanked to the ground. 

“Michael? You can’t be here, it’s not safe.” Alex’s eyes were wild, and he was soaked in sweat.

“I know, that’s why we have to get out of here,” Michael said. He tried to shift the scene to anywhere else, he’d even take their high school at this point, but it refused to change. There were loud explosions in the distance, and it sounded like they were getting closer.

He took Alex’s face in his hands and forced himself to ignore how thin he looked, how tight his skin looked over his skull. “Alex, you have to relax. Remember… remember that time we made out behind the Crashdown? Or your grandmother’s corgis? Or how you used to fantasize about blowing me in the locker room at school?”

The scene wavered for just a second, and Alex looked confused. “There’s a bomb at Roswell High?”

Fuck, Michael was fucking this up. “No, no. Roswell is fine, everything’s going to be fine.”

He hoped that was true. He couldn’t let himself think about what these dreams meant, what it might mean that Alex was suffering like this. He was alive for now, but there was no guarantee. And what would happen to Michael if he was in here with him when -

The scene shifted. It was still full of sand, and the sky looked like it was on fire, but that was because it was Roswell at sunset. They were in Michael’s old truck, the one he’d wrecked almost three years ago.

“Isn’t this better?” Michael asked.

“Yeah, I -” Alex was looking around like he didn’t know how they’d gotten there.

“We’re safe, man, you did it.”

Alex clung to his arm. “Don’t leave me.”

Michael let out a long shaky breath. “Never.” It would only be a few hours til Alex woke up, anyway.

He wanted to ask what happened, if Alex was okay, when he was coming home, but when he even tried to broach the subject, it went poorly, to say the least. The sand and the fire came tearing back through, and Michael had to talk him back down to something calmer, something safer, as the pain drifted in and out on waves.

He lost track of the number of times it happened, but nine times out of ten they wound up back in Michael’s truck.

There was a banging sound coming from far away, and Michael looked around, trying to find the source. Alex didn’t seem too worked up, and it’s not like his dream was full of other people slamming their car doors to break up this idyll. 

Alex grabbed Michael’s hands. “Michael. Michael. You can’t leave, please don’t leave.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Michael said, even as he was jerked awake.

Max was standing over him, shaking Michael’s shoulders. “Michael, _Michael_.”

“What the fuck?” Michael tried to ask. His mouth tasted like sawdust, and his stomach lurched. 

He shoved past Max and out through the open door, kneeling in the scrub while his stomach heaved. Nothing actually came up, and he just spit weakly onto the dirt. Max was there, with his big ‘I’m the responsible one’ hand on Michael’s back and a cold bottle of water in his hand. Where he’d gotten it, Michael didn’t know, but he snatched it from Max, who immediately pulled it back. 

“Easy, you have to drink it slow.”

Michael wanted to swear at him, but his mouth still felt weird, and his telekinesis felt weak and sloppy, so he used his hand to take the bottle.

“What did you take?” Max asked. He sounded angry, which was stupid, Michael was the one who’d been ripped away from… Fuck, Alex. He had to get Max to leave, he had to get back to sleep and make sure Alex was okay.

“Nothing, Jesus, Max.”

“I’m not going to lecture you, or bust you -” Michael thought it was fitting that Max put them in that order; he knew which one bothered Michael more, “- but you have to tell me so we can treat it.”

“Treat what, man? You come barging into my place - you better not have fucked up my door - and now you’re accusing me of shit?”

Max stared at him. “Michael, you missed two days of work, and Isobel said you haven’t answered your phone since Sunday.”

Michael blinked. “What do you mean? What day is it?”

“It’s Tuesday afternoon.” And now Michael could see that Max looked like shit. Wrecked and worried, because Michael had been asleep for almost three days. “Was it a bad batch of nail polish remover?”

“Uh, maybe,” Michael said. The truth was too weird. If he’d been asleep for that long, that meant Alex had been asleep for that long. A coma. He must be in a coma.

Michael’s hand squeezed reflexively, and the plastic bottle crinkled as water shot up and spilled over his hand. It was cold and shocked him back to the conversation with Max.

“Isobel’s going to want to see you. Why don’t you eat something and hop in the shower real quick? I’ll tell her to pick up something for dinner. Or maybe Noah can cook.”

His stomach growled loud enough to make Max raise his eyebrows. “Or maybe both.”

Suddenly Michael was too tired to object. “Yeah, sure.”

*

He let Max and Isobel baby him over dinner, and even Noah seemed relieved to see him, though that was tinged with at least a little bit of rebuke for making Isobel worry. Michael didn’t really have a reason for what had happened, other than the truth. The truth he might have told them if he’d understood it better, or if he actually knew what was going on with Alex.

“I want you to call me tomorrow,” Isobel said. “I don’t care if you’re busy, just. Call me.”

Since Michael had spent the last twenty minutes arguing for the right to go home to his own place that night, he gave in easily. “Yeah, okay. I will.”

“And we’ll get drinks this weekend. All three of us.”

Michael didn’t know if he wanted Noah or Max to be the third there. “Yeah, sure, Iz.”

It wasn’t a surprise when he couldn’t sleep that night, his body full of restless energy after not moving for so long, but it still made Michael want to punch something.

*

On Wednesday, Michael went down to the garage, faked his way through an apology and explanation for his boss, and managed to keep his job after two days of no call, no show. 

“Keep your phone plugged in next time,” Abrams said. “Get one of your friends to bring you something when you’re that sick.”

“Yes, sir,” Michael said, probably laying it on too thick.

He called Isobel on his lunch break. “I’m alive, I’m at work.”

“Good. Stay that way,” she said.

“You’re not the boss of me,” he said, grinning into the phone.

“Are you sure about that?” she asked, hanging up before he could respond.

That night he slept, but his dreams were his own. Thursday and Friday were more of the same, and he was wound tight when he met Noah and Isobel for drinks at the Wild Pony. He needed a super saver of acetone, but Isobel wouldn’t even share hers, because Michael had gone along with Max’s guess about what had messed him up over the weekend.

The bar was crowded with people, and Michael wasn’t in the mood to deal with any of them, especially the guy pouring out his life story to Maria instead of ordering a drink.

“- heard from his brother, he’s going to lose part of his leg.”

“Poor Alex,” Maria said. “But he’s going to be okay, right?”

The man shrugged. “With enough physical therapy, yeah, I guess. The docs back in D.C. know what they're doing.”

“Well, tell Jason to send Alex my love once he wakes up.”

"Sure thing." The man slid a couple of dollars over the sticky bar for a tip, and Maria turned to Michael.

"What can I get you?"

"Isobel needs another vodka tonic," he said automatically. "And I... I need to go."

"Uh, okay."

Michael threw a ten-dollar bill down on the bar and bolted back to Noah and Isobel. "I have to go, your drink is waiting at the bar."

"Michael!" Isobel said sharply. "What do you mean you have to go? Are you _okay_?"

In that moment, Michael was very grateful it was Noah with them and not Max, because it limited her options for stopping him. "Fine, I'm fine. I just can't -"

He couldn't be around all those people. He snagged his hat off the empty chair and nodded at Noah. "See you later."

Alex was alive. Alex was hurt. Alex was in D.C. Those three thoughts followed him out into the cool desert night, and Michael didn't know what to do with any of them.

Alex was alive, good. Great, even. Alex was hurt, Michael had kind of figured that out already. Alex was in D.C. That one threw him. Sure, it explained why he couldn't reach Alex the past few nights, but it didn't explain how Michael had spent three days in his dreams. They were almost two thousand miles apart, and Michael had a feeling it had been even more than that last week, when he'd woken up in Diego's bed.

He sat up for hours that night, trying to make it work in his head. Everything pointed to Alex reaching out for _him_ instead of the reverse. He wanted to say it was impossible, but when it came down to it, a sample size of three orphaned aliens wasn’t much to base sweeping statements on. Their Fortress of Solitude was for shit.

He kept trying to dreamwalk with Alex, but all that ever happened was accidentally walking with Isobel one night and hoping she didn’t notice he was in her dream instead of her in his, and a new breakfast routine that involved a lot of ibuprofen. It was frustrating as hell, and Michael was considering just driving to the East Coast and getting it over with, but then he ran into Alex’s dad in the drug store, while he was restocking his supply of Advil. 

He nodded to the man, and tried to think of a way to ask about Alex. The man didn’t seem like the type to give into small town gossip for the sake of small town gossip, and “Hey, you don’t know me, but your son and I fucked around a lot in high school, how’s he doing?” didn’t really seem like the best approach, either.

“Chief Manes,” another voice said. Michael turned and saw his high school chemistry teacher carrying a basket. “How’s Alex doing?”

It was nice to know other people didn’t have the same issues Michael did.

“Just fine, Ms. Hughes,” Alex’s dad said, stiffly. “He’s recovering nicely, just one more clean-up surgery scheduled for tomorrow.”

“Oh good, we’ve all been thinking of him.”

“I’ll be sure to pass along your regards.”

Michael almost smiled, Alex’s dad seemed to hate the small town bullshit as much as Michael did. Then what Chief Manes had said sunk in. Alex was going to be in surgery, maybe _that_ had been how he’d been able to pull Michael into his dreams. It was a long shot, but Michael was willing to give it a try.

It took agreeing to take Benny’s next two Saturday shifts in order to get him to agree to cover Michael’s shift the next day, especially since Michael refused to tell him _why_ he needed it covered so last-minute.

He stayed up most of the night, not knowing how late the next morning he’d have to stay sleeping in order to have a chance to see Alex. He told himself not to get his hopes up, that it was a last-ditch effort and a Hail Mary, but it felt like something that could be true.

The edge of the horizon was just beginning to lighten when Michael finally fell asleep. He had no way of gauging how long he had to wait before he found himself in the back seat of a fighter jet. “They actually let you fly these things?”

“They used to,” Alex said, turning to face Michael with a sad smile. “If they know what’s good for them, they’ll never let you near one.”

Michael cracked a grin and shrugged his shoulder. “Maybe they’ll get desperate.”

Alex laughed, “They’d let me back in one before they let you.”

He set the plane down outside of the Louvre, even Michael recognized the glass pyramid, and grabbed Michael’s hand. “Come on, I’ve always wanted to show you this.”

He had no way of telling how accurate Alex’s version of the museum was, but it did look pretty cool, and Michael was warmed by the idea that Alex had apparently been here and thought of him. That he hadn’t been completely forgotten. 

“This place is a little nicer than the Roswell Museum and Art Center,” he said, looking around.

“That one had its advantages,” Alex said.

“Yeah, no one guarding the empty exhibition hall.” Michael grinned. “Can we find one of those here?”

The beauty of dreams was that of course they could. It looked an awful lot like the one at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, just somehow more French, and Michael let Alex push him against the wall. 

“There’s never been anyone like you,” Alex said, before covering Michael’s mouth with his own.

It was so easy to make out with him there, to let Alex grind against him. Easy like they were in high school again and no one seemed to give a shit what they got up to at night, as long as Alex’s homework got done and Michael didn’t get busted.

“When I wake up, I’m going to call you,” Alex said, making Michael’s heart skip a little.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “It’s not like I’m going to have a whole lot else on my plate.”

“Wow, you sure know how to make a guy feel special.” Michael could barely put any heat on the words, but he managed to keep himself from smiling.

“Come on, there’s something else I want to show you.”

They wandered through an ever changing landscape of Alex’s memories, Germany, Colorado, Iraq, like they were all just different rooms to explore before moving on to the next one. Michael was going to have to remind himself to ask about these places, to figure out what was real and what was just spat out by Alex’s subconscious as fitting enough.

It was only a little past noon when Michael finally woke up, either naturally or because Alex’s surgery was over, he didn’t know. He immediately reached for his phone, like anyone was going to let Alex have one at the hospital. He didn’t know if Alex still had the same phone number, or if he still had Michael’s, but it wouldn’t be hard to get.

Just in case, he set a different ringtone for Alex, so he’d know immediately when he called.

*

Alex didn’t call.

It had been stupid of Michael to take the word of a man dreaming under anesthesia, but Michael had always been stupid when it came to Alex. He’d just forgotten that over the past nine years. Months passed by, and Michael skipped the parade the town threw in Alex’s honor, spending the afternoon out by the cave with an industrial-strength canister of acetone, instead. 

He didn’t let himself dreamwalk; he knew Alex wouldn’t be sticking around. There was nothing for him here. Michael had heard Maria talking with Alex’s brothers at the Wild Pony a time or two over the years, about how their baby brother never wanted to come home. A missing leg wouldn’t stop him from buying a bus ticket out of town and staying gone for the next ten years, whether the Air Force kept him on or not. It wasn’t like there was anything in town Alex thought was worth sticking around for, that much was clear.

So when he accosted an airman sniffing around his trailer, after spending the night in the drunk tank, he was tempted to pinch himself to see if he was still sleeping it off in Sheriff Valenti’s tender care. Hell, he was tempted to pinch Alex, to see if this was him again.

When Alex knocked on his shin and Michael could hear the sound of the prosthetic, he knew it had to be real. Alex had always dreamed himself uninjured.

Michael was fucked.


End file.
